A social network is a social structure made of units such as individuals or organizations, known as ‘nodes’ which are connected via links representing friendship or the like, known as ‘edges’. Social networks may be supported by internet based social network services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like.
The increasing popularity of computer based social network services introduces the need to manage and query increasing amounts of data. Databases are used for data management of social network services and users may take advantage of simple query languages such as SQL (Structured Query Language) to process their own data as well as that of their immediate contacts.
Traditional databases rely on the assumption that the size of a query is small and the data being queried is large. This approach sits well with the state of current social network services, in which the main social networking features of establishing and managing connections, or edges, between participants, or nodes, is performed manually.
However, as the number of queries increases in size dramatically and connections management is constantly increasing in complexity, current query languages such as SQL lack concepts which are required for expression and querying of connection data.
The need remains, therefore, for effective database evaluation methods for large query sets, whose size is of the same order as (or even larger than) the size of the database on which they run, and a query language including terminology to express connection-based queries. Embodiments described hereinbelow address this need.